As you may have noticed, we’ve been very quiet at Streema - no big news announcements nor blog posts over the past few months. The truth is that it’s been a busy time here. We’ve been quietly working on a few different things, the most important being listening to your feedback and improving our Simple Radio application.

Well, we can say that the work is paying off: even though we launched Simple Radio less than a year ago - 11 months ago on October 27, 2014 to be exact - we’re proud to say that we recently hit the 1M MAU milestone. Even more importantly, those are happy users that have sent us thousands of happy messages as well as given us a 4.5 average rating across mobile platforms, making us one of the highest rated radio apps out there.

We’re still hard at work, since the work is never finished, but wanted to take a moment to share the good news.

obsession - (noun) (ob*ses*sion)- a state in which someone thinks about something constantly or frequently.

People are so passionate about certain aspects of their life that they become obsessed. Sports fans with their teams. Parents with their kids. Dog owners with their dogs. At Streema, our obsession is solving people’s problems with simple products to make their lives better. That’s why we’re proud to announce that we’re launching Simple Radio for Apple Watch.

Simple Radio on Apple Watch gives simplicity a whole new meaning. It’s another opportunity for us to improve the lives of radio listeners around the world. To deliver on our promise, we’ve created the app so that no user needs to spend longer than 5 seconds to access the station they want. We’ve made critical design decisions to minimize friction based on the limited screen real estate. Here are the the features we’ve decided to include in Simple Radio for Apple Watch:

We have to make great products in order to solve our customers’ problems. Great products require attention to detail. You have to be extremely passionate to be this meticulous. You need to be obsessed. Luckily for our customers, our obsession only makes their lives easier. Our obsession makes life simpler.

A few months ago we launched Simple Radio for iOS and we are happy to say that the response from our users has been fantastic. Our app recently reached 500,000 installs with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars in the App Store. All thanks to your support!

But today’s post isn’t about iOS, it’s about the other great mobile platform that our users love. We’re happy to welcome Simple Radio for Android!

As with its iOS cousin, Simple Radio for Android is free and super easy to use. You’ll be able to get to your favorite stations blazingly fast and listen to them without any interruptions.

Streema.com Redesign: We started redesigning our entire site early this year, and one of the most challenging parts were the radio station profiles - in case you’re interested, here was the method behind the scenes.

But what about the Radio Stations audience around the world? Well, this is what it looks like when the Listeners in Streema’s Platform (Streema.com & Simple Radio App for iOS):

You can zoom in and out, and see a detail about what radio station is listening each user in real time:

How we built it?

In order to develop this map, we've employed a few tools and services. In first place, we used Mapbox, whose Javascript Open Source Library allows you to create beautiful interactive maps and data visualizations and integrate them to your website in minutes. Mapbox also has a customizable map layer of streets, buildings and places around the World, known as Mapbox Streets, powered by open data from OpenStreetMap.

In addition, Mapbox also provides an easy way to add some really useful Leaflet plugins to add some awesome features and interactions. By instance, markers clustering is done using Leaflet.markercluster, and the zoom slider widget it's here thanks to Leaflet.zoomslider.

Behind the scenes

So far, this is what you see. But how do we make everything work behind the scenes? Here at Streema, we have a set of services and applications, and between them we have Streema’s website and Simple Radio App for iOS.

Both applications keep track of several user actions and general metrics using an internal tracking tool which sends that information to a central service. By instance, we track every radio station played by every user. This central service also provides an interface to all our applications for listening to a subset of that actions and metrics. This way, we've been able to build a pretty simple application (using Tornado, a python framework and asynchronous networking library), that listens to every radio-played event and sends that information (using a websocket connection) to each visitor who’s seeing this map.

The simplicity of the application wouldn’t have been possible without the help from Maxmind whose geoip2 library gives us the power to localize each user; without the help from Heroku to get up and running quickly a production website; and NewRelic for keeping it constantly monitored and trace all the errors.

1) Register in duolingo.com and download the app 2) Level Up in Duolingo! 3) Watch TV/Movies in Spanish with Subtitles on Netflix or Mexican TV with Streema.com 4) Install the Dictionary.com app, available for Android and iOS. Learn a new word every day 5) Join a MeetUp in your city and have live conversations spanish.meetup.com Try Japaños! 6) Learn slang listening to radio with Streema.com/radios/genre/Spanish Have a Taco! 7) Learn about "Lucha Libre" 8) Practice video calling real people with Verbling.com 9) Travel to Mexico Have a Tequila shot 10) Date a Spanish-speaking person 😉

At Streema, we’ve been wanting to develop a mobile application for a long time. Additionally, it was the #1 most popular request we got from our users over the past few years. Finally, this year we made it happen!

When you first launch Simple Radio, you’ll notice that it’s super easy to use, comes with just the essentials and has a beautiful design. We wanted to create a pure radio experience, removing everything that could get in the way of you and your favorite radio stations. Just go to the App Store, install Simple Radio (it’s free!) and experience it for yourself. Once you have tried it, we would love to hear what you think of it: you can always email us at simple at streema.com.Also, if you want to make us really happy, go ahead and tweet about the launch and use the following link ( http://bit.ly/simpleradioapp ) to help drive others to download for free and enjoy.

We’re writing today because we wanted to give you a heads up that next week we’ll be announcing something new at Streema. It’s something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but it was not until this year that we felt we could work on it.

We can’t say more right now, but soon you’ll find out - and we know many of you Streema users will be happy about it. 🙂

Every day at Streema we have people from all over the world using our service, spanning over 200 countries. People speaking all of the major languages come to our site to listen to radio and watch tv and for a long time our site was only in English.

The truth is that we’ve always thought of our site as a global service and to that end, not to long ago, we started translating our site to other languages. Back in the day, we initially started with German and French. We wanted to see what the uptake would be and, given the positive feedback, we decided this year to do Spanish and Portuguese.

Now, we are considering expanding to more languages at Streema. So we ask you: which ones do you think we should add next? Please let us know in the comments below and stay tuned for more language-related updates in the future!